Depending on how you look at it, Daniel Cormier is in for an easy night of work on Saturday, or a nerve-wracking, potentially disastrous one.

That’s because the Strikeforce heavyweight grand prix winner will be taking a big step backward when he faces little-known Dion Staring at the organization’s farewell event, “Strikeforce: Marquardt vs. Saffiedine,” in Oklahoma City this weekend.

Just how big a mismatch is it? According to oddsmakers, Cormier (10-0 MMA, 7-0 SF) is anywhere from an 18-1 to a 20-1 favorite against Staring (28-7 MMA, 0-0 SF) in their Showtime-televised main-card bout. Those are the kind of odds you’d expect to see if Cormier fought his accountant. Those are wounded bird vs. hungry cat odds, right there. Assuming the oddsmakers aren’t completely out of their minds – they are, after all, in the business of being right about this stuff – what does this fight actually mean?

For Cormier, it’s one of those nothing-to-gain fights. You know the type. We’ve seen a lot of them in MMA recently. It’s what happens when a highly ranked fighter takes on an opponent whose skills are thought to be so far below his that victory is assumed, and we move straight into a debate over style points. It’s the kind of fight in which winning a close decision would be a kind of defeat, and in which losing would be a career catastrophe. If Cormier knocks out Staring with his first punch and then levitates over his unconscious body, that might be enough to impress people. If he merely steamrolls him the same way he’s steamrolled every other opponent? Meh.

It’s sort a Twilight Zone-esque twist for Cormier when you think about his recent career trajectory. He started out as the world-class wrestling import who built momentum slowly in fights against steadily improving competition. Then, when the Strikeforce grand prix got weird almost immediately, Cormier stepped up and won the whole thing. He went from pummeling mid-level nobodies to smacking former champs around like they were giant Ping-Pong balls. He advanced so quickly, only to end his Strikeforce run with a fight that would have made more sense closer to the beginning of it.

It’s not that the powers that be didn’t try to give him an opponent worth working up a sweat for. It’s just that, between the ongoing injury curse and the fact that many UFC fighters look at a night spent in Strikeforce as more punishment than opportunity, good heavyweights are hard to come by these days. So Cormier gets Staring, who, for all we know, might surprise everyone and put a few oddsmakers out of work.

That’s the other thing that makes this such a bad deal for Cormier. Say he goes out on Saturday night and discovers, in the most violent way possible, that Staring really is up to this level of competition. Say he loses, and say the resulting fan response melts down every MMA website and message board on the Internet. What then?

My guess is most people will regard it as Cormier’s failure more than Staring’s success. Or at least, that’s how they’ll see it until they get another chance to see Staring fight. If Staring goes on to become the UFC heavyweight champ and establishes a reign of dominance that results in people calling him the Dutch Joe Louis, then sure, we’ll look back on Cormier’s loss and decide it wasn’t so shocking in retrospect. That’s fine for five years from now. But what about Sunday morning?

It’s a raw deal for Cormier, but there’s not a lot he can do about it. Win this fight, and people will insist it means nothing. Lose it, and it means everything. The best he can hope for is to smash Staring, get paid, and move on to his new life as a UFC fighter. You know those cop movies in which the grizzled old detective just has to make it through one more shift before retiring to sip Mai Tais in tropical locales? This is kind of the MMA equivalent of that. It’s just that, in the movies, that’s when the cop gets perforated with bullet holes or else drawn into a vortex of a case that will leave him a shattered man even if he does live long enough to sink his toes in the sand.

But hey, that’s only in Hollywood. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to 20-1 favorites. Not in real life. Right?

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